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nk497 writes "Google has announced the hardware partners for the Chrome OS — so we can expect to see netbooks running the operating system next year from the likes of Asus, Acer, and HP, as well as Toshiba. Dell didn't seem to make the list, at least yet. Google also said it had teamed up with Adobe, which could mean Google is looking to include the Acrobat.com web-based software suite in some way."

This is the company that left VisualBasic background processes running from their install, looking for all the world like VB script viruses or trojans! Soaking up an appreciable amount of memory and CPU, just so their functionality would pop-up quickly. Any company where the marketdroids can have their way and do something that most geeks would know is inadvisable -- they are too infested to salvage.

I thought that Google had some sort of... I don't know... pride, or moral reservation at using anything else than javascript and HTML for its dynamic content. Flash would seem like a backward step to me.

Any 'web book' is gonna need Flash. It's too ubiquitous to ignore, but at least it's more cross-platform than Silverlight. If Google were to buy it and 'make it free' (one way or another), that might be good for us all. Maybe that's why they're hedging about supporting Ogg video in HTML5.

How about just plain old Flash? Adobe has yet to release a stable 64b linux Flash player. The hacks to make the 32b version work on 64b linux are rather poor, too. I'm sure Google would want to use 64b linux for their Chrome Window Manager, but that would be a hard sell to consumers with flaky Flash support.

How about just plain old Flash? Adobe has yet to release a stable 64b linux Flash player. The hacks to make the 32b version work on 64b linux are rather poor, too. I'm sure Google would want to use 64b linux for their Chrome Window Manager, but that would be a hard sell to consumers with flaky Flash support.

Pure fud, the linux 64bit plugin works just as well as the windows flash plugin. The work arounds to install a 32bit plugin have not been needed for a long time.

Releasing desktop OS without ability to play YouTube videos, for example, would be really stupid. Also, Skype (or Google replacement?) will need Flash too. I can't see that working on JavaScript. Then there are existing apps (Gmail) that use Flash for some functionallity.

Actually, getting flash working on 64 bit linux is even easier than getting google gears working. (Incidentally, anyone else notice that gears STILL isn't out for FF3.5? Their excuse for not doing testing during the RC is that they'd have to make too many builds. Fail, fail, fail. Also, STILL no gears for 64 bit linux, you have to get a third party xpi every time there's an update. Fail, fail, FAIL!)

Is this just smoke and mirrors. From what I have read this is Linux with a custom GUI on the front end. Depending on how they market it and which distro it is built from will probably dictate how far it goes. I use the *buntu and Suse variants of Linux on a daily basis. Unless this offers any real advantage I won't move to it even it I purchase a netbook with it I would probably format and load Ubuntu on it.

The real advantage it offers is that Google, a company that the average end user has heard of, is pushing it. There's also half a chance that the OS will be user-friendly enough for the average end user not to run screaming from, unlike most Linux distros. Hell, they may even be able to use it without ever having to see a command prompt.

All this means it's actually in with a chance of competing with Windows on the desktop.

Frankly, I still expect Google OS to become at best a tiny portion of the PC market. But that said, they have enormous advantages over other Linux desktop distributions: 1. Name recognition - favorable name recognition - from the average computer user. 2. Massive funding available for QA, pretty graphics, detailed documentation, and so forth. These days Ubuntu and OpenSuse, among others, are damn good, but Google has the resources to do even better. 3. Massive funding available for advertising. 4. The ability to sell machines to end-users with their distribution pre-installed. This has happened before with Linux in small numbers, but even at its peak it was tiny numbers and little attention. This will be available and widely known.

But even with all those advantages, I expect the three way combination of Microsoft FUD, Microsoft genuine attempts to compete by improving their products, and consumer comfort with Microsoft will still leave Redmond controlling more than 90% of the PC market.

Y'know not all off the netbook retreat to XP was driven by Microsoft's pressure (though I'm sure there was plenty of that too).

The various netbook Linux'es were not great. Just read Slashdot, etc. Everyone was happy, happy, happy that Linux netbooks were being sold... and then they went on to say that the distros on the netbooks were crap - you should replace them with distro X. Is it any wonder that once the price advantage was gone, the netbook OEM's went with XP? Linux may well have worked better on

There's also half a chance that the OS will be user-friendly enough for the average end user not to run screaming from, unlike most Linux distros. Hell, they may even be able to use it without ever having to see a command prompt.

Pure FUD. The only things I have used the command prompt for in the last few months (running Linux Mint, at the machine):

1) ping and dig - and both of those can be done from the GUI, I just prefer the command line.2) Django manage.py commands3) ssh into a remove server4) Restarting lighttpd

Now, how many of those are things the average user would need to do? All my average user stuff (installing desktop apps, web browsing, email, etc.) gets done without a command prompt in site.

Just because the sort of people who read Slashdot need to use the command prompt to get stuff done - stuff that most people have never heard of - does not mean the average user will ever see one.

No, your post is pure FUD. I bet you're posting from a top of the line gaming machine right? Bought the parts off newegg, and put it together yourself? Good hardware support, right?

I have an old Dell computer sitting here, which is something the average user would have. Here's the problems I encountered:

1) xorg.conf needed to be manually configured to fix the resolution and refresh rate. It required a lot of cmdline stuff; not as simple as opening the file in gedit and clicking save.

2) Ubuntu 8.10 broke compatibility with the SATA controller, in such a way that it booted okay, and then corrupted the disk while running. This took quite a bit of cmdline work to "fix". I wiped out the partition and installed a SATA PCI card to run the drive from.

3) Permissions wouldn't stick on my ext3 partition. Had to use cmdline rather than Nautilus to get it so users could read files and create new files on the partition. Without doing that, gedit couldn't save anywhere, and I couldn't open anything Firefox downloaded.

No offense to you, but the average user won't tolerate this crap. They barely tolerate stuff like UAC, and this is way beyond that.

It's a linux kernel, not necessarily a distribution in any meaningful sense. They could simplify it to the linux kernel, loader, some libraries, and chrome executable. I suppose they would need a shell, scripts, and helper apps for network config and dhcp, but For a browser-based internet device, 99% of a standard linux distro is irrelevant.

It's a linux kernel, not necessarily a distribution in any meaningful sense. They could simplify it to the linux kernel, loader, some libraries, and chrome executable. I suppose they would need a shell, scripts, and helper apps for network config and dhcp, but For a browser-based internet device, 99% of a standard linux distro is irrelevant.

According to Anandtech, which may be mostly speculating, ChromeOS is just enough Linux to run Chrome. All functionality will come from web apps. It's the thinnest of thin clients.

Obviously we'll have to wait and see what they release. But I fail to see how starting from an existing OS means that they aren't bringing anything new, or that they're relying on marketing. And even better, they'll be giving their new OS back to the open source community.

Unless this offers any real advantage I won't move to it even it I purchase a netbook with it I would probably format and load Ubuntu on it.

I was under the impression that they were making a new window manager. Replacing X would be a lot of (unnecessary) work, and possibly too ambitious a project due for release next year (even for Google).

Maybe eventually they'll replace X, but I don't see why they'd want to this early.

Just today, I gave a presentation created with Google Docs. WIth the right background and font colors, it was virtually indistinguisable from our usual company its PowerPoint template. Combining all the Google stuff together and you have a situation where you hardly need local storage. So, I'd give the Chrome OS a hearty welcome, even though it might offer too much limitations for others. I've given up my office suite, my IMAP and SMTP server and my webmail. For me personally, it's perfectly usable in business.

My presentations are usually outside my office. Relying on a working internet connection for them sounds like a a major PITA to me, considering how much effort is usually involved for accessing a corporate LAN.

My presentations are usually outside my office. Relying on a working internet connection for them sounds like a a major PITA to me, considering how much effort is usually involved for accessing a corporate LAN.

Giving presentations off-site/off-line not the purpose of Google Docs. It's meant for sharing, collaborating and what have you. To do a presentation somewhere, just export to PDF and run it full-screen in any PDF viewer, on any OS.

Presentations are not too bad, the spreadsheet is mediocre, and the word processor is abysmal.
Unfortunately, most people would want to use the word processor.
As a prof, I do use the spreadsheet regularly, shared among the TAs of my class to log assignment and exam marks. As it allows shared editing, I always have the latest grades input from the TAs for the class. I don't have to try to get individual spreadsheets and try to integrate the data at the last minute, hoping that everybody's names list mat

Because Google wants a platform running all of it's applications in a Google branded environment that google controls. This isn't some altruistic, give to the Linux community effort. This is a business move. And if it drives even more people to their sites, it sounds like a pretty good one.

These are partners that make computers sold to consumers. Intel and AMD make CPUs that go into those computers and (AFAIK) don't make computers themselves, which is why they are not on this list. Also, they have already announced that they will support both x86 and ARM processors.

While TFS fails to mention it, a major part of TFA is that they are partnering with the likes of Freescale, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments. These 3 companies are all semiconductor manufacturers, like AMD and Intel, and produce some of the most exciting and leading edge ARM based mobile multimedia solutions out there. You can't deny that it's odd the x86 architecture goes completely unrepresented.

IMO, ChromeOS is probably going to be geared more for cheap 'internet appliances' where ARM is much better su

all the press coverage yesterday characterized google's OS ambitions as an attack on MicroSoft or a counter attack in light of Bing.
But to me, an open source OS enhanced for web-top uses sounds mighty like an attack on Intel/Moblin. After all, ARM processors are
to be supported too from the little I have read of google's plans.

The OS wont have x11 so you are limited in what conventional apps you can run OO (not much chance), abiword/gnumeric/koffice all have plenty of their own problems to sort before porting, so what office suite will this ship....google-office, compete with ads.same goes for mail clients, thunderbird/kontact/etc are all huge projects porting to run without X will be a pita....gmail to the resuceOFC people will eventually port thier apps and thier are alternatives (yahoomail, livemail, etc), but if we've learnt

What I see it as is a commercial developer friendly version of Linux.Odds are that it will.1. Have an app store for people to sell apps. Yea the web based apps is all cool but I think that side of it is being over blown.2. Will have Flash and codec support without having to get it from a none US repository. Google will pay for the rights.3. It will come pre-installed for aunt Tilly.

The one thing I wonder about is will Google fork the Kernel and add a stable driver binary interface? If so will we soon see a

An attack on moblin? People will overwhelmingly be using google through moblin. Anyway, moblin is far from ready for primetime itself, so far intel has only been able to make narrow progress. The sad thing is that it only works properly on a select set of intel stuff. It really ought to work on the centrino laptops which are practically identical (sometimes with the same graphics chipset) but they aren't even trying to do that. In fact many intel wifi cards are unsupported. Moblin is its own worst enemy.

So Google's doing their own OS and partnering with Adobe, the purveyors of the biggest, buggiest and least secure bloatware on your computer. Great. Given the business Google is in - advertising, and the more of it the better - they're likely to take steps to make sure that all those slippery users out there do their patriotic duty and view all ads sent their way, no matter how obnoxious. Is there even an Adblock for Chrome?

Yes. Everyone's heard of Google already and many are using it. Google will be different sheerly because everyone else will be using it and it'll be better supported by both the company and random people you know or meet. Also, you know Google isn't going anywhere for a long, long time.

As someone who has worked in banks and developed eBanking applications, mod this up... You have no idea how true this is.... I (as a developer) told them countless times not to develop for IE only. They didn't listen to me. However, they completely changed faces when a rich-ass Linux user (no kidding, I was surprised too!) called in to complain. Then they put fire under our (the developers) asses, because they wanted it fixed ASAP.

Dell's netbooks are overpriced anyway. Seriously, I went shopping for one recently and their netbooks seemed crazy expensive compared to asus, acer, et. al.

I do not know about Dell, but Acer machines have the fame of being completely craptastic. I stopped using/trusting Acer computer after having to provide service to 486Dx which had very crappy cases that seemed more like bad quality lego's. Or the other "stylish" black computers which were a completely piece of shit. I think Acer lack of quality may be only surpassed by that of Sony (which, may not be as bad due to quality but more because of the use of al lthose close formats)

Well, it seems to me that the Dell-netbooks are solidly built with good design, whereas those cheap as hell Asuses and Acers look and feel like cheap plastic toys. So those Dells might be "overpriced" in the same sense as Toyotas's are "overpriced" when compared to Hyundais. The features might be more or less the same, but Hyundais feel like they are about to fall apart right there and then.

wait you mean its more likely that a web based os that will need flash to provide a rich web experience, will partner with the makers of flash for their flash technology, rather than the web-services which will surely be available to anybody with a webbrowser anyway?!

Doesn't matter. Based on the number of security exploits found in Adobe software over the last couple of years, I'm of the opinion that they shouldn't be allowed to write software for public consumption anymore. It seems that every week there's another PDF or Flash exploit out. If Google is promoting the OS based on how secure it is, they may want to develop their own Flash and PDF viewers.

One just has to look at the silly posts back when Android was announced and all the inane and irrelevant garbage spewed about the goddamn iPhone and if Android was an 'iPhone killer'.

With every major cellphone maker coming out with Android phones and demoing their custom interfaces and software built on top of Android and Windows Mobile virtually forgotten about, you would think people would wise up and grasp how huge this move by Google is into the netbook market.

Google also said it had teamed up with Adobe, which could mean Google is looking to include the Acrobat.com web-based software suite in some way.

First off, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if anyone is teaming up with Adobe to include Adobe web stuff that it's not going to focus on Acrobat but on Adobe Flash, Adobe AIR, and that whole ecosystem.

That out of the way, what the Flippety Friggery, Google?

You're building a new OS based on the Linux kernel + Chrome Browser, which is cool because these are both high-quality Free Software projects. But then you wander off and sidle up to Adobe instead of working with Free Software such as Gnash [gnu.org].

This seems like a repeat of the situation with the ARM folks. Gnash has had ARM support for several years, but instead of the ARM people collaborating with Gnash to get full Flash support on their processors, the ARM people worked with Adobe to make a whole new port to ARM [slashdot.org], instead.

Now Google is working on a slick new OS and has an amazing opportunity to have the whole thing be Free Software. Gnash is getting very mature, and with support from a organization like Google it could easily become the best Flash player on Free OSes, if not on all OSes.

C'mon Google: Team up with Gnash and other Free Software projects and make Chrome OS one for the history books.

From the perspective of the user, what is worse than being dependent on non-free software such as Flash?

Answer - being dependent on non-free software that only runs on someone else's machine as a remote service. The goal of Chrome is to replace customer lock-in to Windows and Office with lock-in to Google's "software as a service". Since customer data will be held hostage by Google, along with the only applications that can read it, no "Openoffice" or "Linux" will be coming to rescue the user from this lock-in. But hey, it's Google, they won't "be evil", right? (hollow laughter).

I am unsure why other free software advocates are supporting this idea, unless the enemy of Microsoft is automatically our friend.

This year's Google Summer of Code is providing approx $5M in scholarships for students to work on Free Software projects. No strings attached other than an oversight framework to make sure the system is not abused.

Second, having Google out there in the OS business means that we're probably going to see better cross-platform support by large players. Right now just about every company/website/service supports Windows. A large subset of those support OSX. And a somewhat smaller subset also support GNU/Linux. If a GNU/Linux-based OS comes along with the might of Google behind it, we're probably going to see a lot more companies stepping up to support that kind of stack.

Did you miss the part about this being strictly a "web OS"?

Every company/website/service will support Chrome OS eventually, but that doesn't mean that they will support Linux. No more than companies writing Android applications today somehow support Linux. For both Android and Chrome OS, Linux kernel and base system is really just an internal implementation detail, and not something that application developers will deal with directly. Forget about POSIX as well.

Third, standards. Google has done a pretty darn good job of supporting them, unlike other big players. More Google software out there will probably mean greater support for standards.

Google is a giant. It partners with other giants, not with little independent reverse-engineering projects.

Google might not "partner" with small groups per se, but it does use a lot of FOSS and contribute a lot of time and patches back to projects. It doesn't need to become best buddies with Gnash; even a tip of the hat in Gnash's direction could mean a lot in terms of acknowledgment and encouraging other Flash producers to work with Gnash on compatibility.

The more I think about the situation, the more I wonder if the fact that Gnash is GPLv3 is part of what's scaring Google away. Google seems to have had a bit

Why does everybody act like Chrome OS will somehow be locked down to just running Chrome and using webapps into it? Just because the original blog post emphasised on the webapps part doesn't mean it will be any less functional than your favourite distro. They're not stupid, they'll do what the market wants to eat Microsoft's yummy marketshare, they won't give you a half-assed OS, they'll give you a fully featured OS that has the advantage of having an OS designed around performance, security, usability and more importantly (according to them) designed around the use of web apps in mind. That means you can beat your ass you'll have all the offline apps you want and have an OS just as functional as your favourite distro.

As for partnering with Adobe, what do you know, maybe they're out to get Adobe Photoshop on Chrome OS;-).

There is _no_ news here about who the partners will be. It's just a day-late write-up of the original Google Chrome announcement. This should never have been published as 'news' this late in the game much less Slashdotted.

I have to wonder if the Chrome OS is going to turn out like Android has so far. When Android was first announced and also when it was first released, pundits claimed Android phones were going to take over the market, and everyone and their mother supposedly announced they were going to release piles of new Android-based phones.

And here we are now and in reality there are very few Android phones on the market, and Android phones seems to be largely absent from all the big cellphone shows.

I'm weary allready. First Android, then a completely differently branded second Linux knockoff. I know Google isn't dependant on making money with their software and OSes projects, but the last thing we need is further market confusion due to Google joining the fray of alternative OSes and distros. I beg that they manage to string Android and this Chrome OS thing into one OS ecosystem and that it will be well standardised and documented.

And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

The Chrome web browser has been a complete revelation in terms of security with a track record of no security problems whatsoever. Since they are building Chrome OS on top of Linux then "completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS" presumably means redesigning the security architecture of Linux. Since Linux is GPL then clearly Linus will be able to accept all of Google's changes and redesigns and then Linux will have no security flaws ever again. I'm quite sure Linus will be delighted to do so.

It would be such a joy to have an OS that never needs a security update and I'm delighted that Google will implement one.

Google really are ever so kind and generous in doing this for the world.

The only way to achieve an OS that cannot be affected by any kind of malware is to have one with absolutely no persistent state and no ability to run any kind of user installed program. So is that code for, "we're going to cripple it so bad it'll be useless for anything except running Chrome"? Or is there some fundamental way around this that I'm not seeing?

Just like OSX is nothing more then a distro of BSD? If someone (say Google) makes "just another distro" that actually brings Linux out into the mainstream, then I'm all for it. What's the harm of it, anyways? Google's releasing the source code so can't really understand how this may be evil. I must be missing the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt angle.

Fixed it for you. So, they're using a proven and tested OS kernel instead of making their own from scratch. So?? That really doesn't tell you much, by that I mean, just knowing that they use the Linux kernel doesn't allow you to infer much about what it's actually gonna be like as an OS.